05.19. Appendix B.

Appendix B.—The Doctrine Of A Future State.. IN the text we have merely vindicated the Old Testament Scriptures from any charge of inconsistence in the reserve these maintained regarding the doctrine of a future state. It is desirable, however, to present the subject in a fuller light, and to consider both the state of opinion that prevailed respecting it in heathen antiquity, and the relation in which the Old and the New Testament Scriptures alike stand to it. We shall thus have an opportunity of pointing out several erroneous views, as we conceive, that are still of frequent occurrence in discussions upon the subject.

1. First of all, we look to the general fact that—somehow, and in some form or another, a belief in the doctrine of the soul’s immortality has prevailed in nations which had only natural resources to guide them in their religious views and tenets. We are not aware of any considerable people, either in ancient or in modern times, of whom this might not be affirmed; and among all nations that have reached any degree of intelligence and civilisation, it is notorious that the doctrine has always held a recognised and prominent place in the articles of popular belief. In no age or country has a public religion existed, which did not associate with it the prospect of a future state of happiness or misery as one of its leading elements and most influential considerations. So much is this the case, that the fear of the gods in heathen states was very commonly looked upon as identified with the expectation of good and evil in a life after the present; and the ancient legislators, who established, and the sages who vindicated, the importance of religion, with one consent agree in deriving its main virtue from the salutary hopes and terrors it inspired respecting the life to come.^[158] We are perfectly entitled, therefore, from the existence and prevalence of religion among men, to infer, in a corresponding degree, the existence and prevalence of a belief in the immortality of the soul, or its destination in some form hereafter to a better or a worse state than belongs to it here. And as nothing ever attains to the rank of a universal belief, or general characteristic of mankind, which is not rooted in some common instinct of man’s nature, we may further assert it as an undoubted fact, that this idea of a future state is one that springs from the spiritual instincts which belong to man as man; or, in the expressive language of Coleridge, that “its fibres are to be traced to the taproot of humanity.”

[158] See Warburton’s Div. Leg., B. III. § 1, for the proof of this; and Russell’s Connection, vol. i., p. 308, seq.

Exceptions, no doubt, are to be found to it, even among those who externally joined in the popular religion of their country; but only in the case of persons, or parties, who were unfavourably situated for the development of their spiritual instincts, and who have seldom, in any age or country, formed more than a small minority of their generation. Such an exception, for example, appeared in the case of the Sadducees in the latter days of the Hebrew commonwealth,—a sect small in point of numbers, and one that sprang up, partly as a reaction from the superstitions and frivolities of Pharisaism, and partly from the spread of Grecian culture among the richer and more ambitious classes in Judea. It was essentially a sect of philosophy, and had drunk too deeply of the sceptical influences of heathenism to be much impressed with any religious beliefs; though its repulsion to Pharisaism probably led it to take up more of an extreme position in respect to them than it might otherwise have done. But it is impossible for any one to read the occasional notices given of the sect in Josephus, without perceiving that, as a party, they habitually did violence to the moral as well as the spiritual instincts of their nature; that they exhibited the usual characteristics of the infidel spirit, and would very soon have ceased even from the profession of religion, if they had not been surrounded by a religious atmosphere. So that they can scarcely be regarded as exceptions to the natural union of the religious sentiment with the prospect of an hereafter; for the religious sentiment had but a shadowy existence in their bosom.

Substantially the same explanation is to be given of the views entertained by individual writers, and by some whole sects of heathen philosophers. Their intellectual culture unfitted them for sympathizing with the popular forms, into which either the worship of the gods or the belief of a future state of existence had thrown itself. They saw the grossness and manifold absurdity of what had obtained the general assent, without having anything of their own clearly defined and thoroughly ascertained to put in its place; and the inevitable result was, that many of them became sceptical on the whole subject of religion, and others wavered from side to side in a kind of half-belief sometimes giving utterance to the hopes and fears that naturally sprang from the conviction of a Supreme Governor, and again expressing themselves as if all heaven were a fable, and all futurity a blank. It was not that nature in them wanted the spiritual instincts it seems to possess in other men, or that these instincts failed to link themselves with the prospect of a future existence; but that, situated as they were, the instincts wanted appropriate forms in which to clothe their feelings and expectations, and thus had either to hew out a channel of their own for faith and hope to flow in (which they were often too weak to do), or collapsed into a state of painful uncertainty or sceptical disbelief.

We take this to be both a fairer and a more rational account of the state of opinion prevalent among the more thoughtful and speculative part of ancient heathens, than that given by Bishop Warburton, and argued anew in recent times by Archbishop Whately. Warburton has laboured, with a great profusion of learning, to show that all the ancient philosophers, with the exception of Socrates, were in their real sentiments disbelievers in a future state of reward and punishment, and only taught it in their exoteric writings as a doctrine profitable to the vulgar. We think it is impossible to make out this by any fair interpretation of the better writings of heathen antiquity, and without giving far too much weight to the explanations and statements of the later Sophists and Neo-Platonists, who are no proper authorities on such questions. The doctrine of the soul’s immortality, and of its destination to a future state of reward or punishment, comes out too frequently in the higher and even more philosophical productions of the ancients, to admit of being explained on the ground of a mere paltering to vulgar superstition and prejudice. And both the frequency of its recurrence, and the variety of forms in which the belief is uttered, force on us the conviction that the writers, in uttering it, often expressed the native sentiments of their hearts. But then the crude representations and incredible absurdities with which the doctrine was mixed up in the only authoritative form known to them, as often again drove them back from the ground they were inclined to occupy, and set speculation, with her daughters, doubt and uncertainty, wholly adrift. They could not fall in, heart and soul, with what had been embodied in the religion of their country, and had established itself in the popular belief; and it was, therefore, perfectly natural, that many inconsistencies on the subject should appear in their writings; that they should be found retracting at one time what they seemed to have conceded at another; and that in their recoil of feeling from the palpably erroneous on one side, they should often have lost themselves in thick darkness on the other.

All this, however, is to be understood only of the more learned and speculative portion of heathen antiquity; of those who either formally attached themselves to some sect of philosophy, or were, to a certain extent, imbued with the spirit of philosophy. Such persons were manifestly in the most unfavourable position for the free development of their spiritual instincts. Policy alone, or a sense of public duty, led them to take any part in defending the existence, or in observing the rites, of the prevailing religion; so that they were continually doing the part of dissemblers and hypocrites. But, undoubtedly, they would not have done in this respect what they did, or avowed so often their belief in a moral government above, and a state of recompense before them, unless these ideas had been inter woven with the established religion, and had come, through it, to pervade the minds of their countrymen. Warburton’s declarations to this effect may be regarded as substantially correct, when he lays down the position, that a future state of rewards and punishments was not only taught and propagated by lawgivers, priests, and philosophers, but was also universally received by the people throughout the whole earth.^{[159] [159]} Div. Leg., B. III., § 2.

Dr Whately, however, who, in his Essay on the Revelation of a Future State, generally re-echoes, as before stated, the sentiments of Warburton, expresses discordant views on this part of the subject. He seems to think that the people generally had as little belief in the existence of a future state of reward and punishment as the philosophers. From an expression in Plato, that “men in general were highly incredulous as to the soul’s future existence,” he concludes it to have been “notoriously the state of popular opinion” at the time, that “the accounts of Elysium and Tartarus were regarded as mere poetical fables, calculated to amuse the imagination, but unworthy of serious belief.” Let us test this conclusion by a parallel declaration from a Platonic English philosopher—Lord Shaftesbury. This nobleman, ridiculing the fear of future punishment as fit at best only for the vulgar, adds regarding others, “Such is the nature of the liberal, polished, and refined part of mankind; so far are they from the mere simplicity of babes and sucklings, that, instead of applying the notion of a future reward or punishment to their immediate behaviour in society, they are apt much rather, through the whole course of their lives, to show evidently that they look on the pious narrations to be indeed no better than children’s tales, and the amusement of the mere vulgar.”^[160] This is, in fact, a far stronger and more sweeping assertion of a general disbelief among the learned now regarding the expectation of a future state, than that made by Plato of the generality of men in ancient times; but who would think of founding on such a statement, though uttered with the greatest assurance, as if no one could doubt what was said, a conclusion as to the all but universal rejection by educated men in modern times of the Scripture representations of the future world? Who does not know that the conclusion would be notoriously false? But the inference drawn from the remark of Plato rests on a still looser foundation. And, indeed, if the matter had been as Dr Whately represents it, even in Plato’s time, where should have been the temptation to the philosophers who lived then and afterwards, for so often speaking and writing differently, as is alleged, from what they really thought, respecting the world to come? They did so, we are told, in accommodation to the popular belief—that is (if this representation were correct), in accommodation to a belief which was known to have had no actual existence.

[160] Characteristics, vol. iii., p. 177.

Dr Whately lays special stress in this part of his essay on the account given by Thucydides, of the effects produced among the Athenians by the memorable plague which ravaged the city and neighbourhood. Many at first, the historian tells us, “had recourse to the offices of their religion, with a view to appease the gods; but when they found their sacrifices and ceremonies availed nothing against the disease, and that the pious and impious alike fell victims to it, they at once concluded that piety and impiety were altogether indifferent, and cast oft all religious and moral obligations.” “Is it not evident from this,” the Archbishop asks, “that those who did reverence the gods had been accustomed to look for none but temporal rewards and punishments from them? Can we conceive that men who expected that virtue should be rewarded, and vice punished, in the other world, would, just at their entrance into that world, begin to regard virtue and vice as indifferent?” We take this to be an entire misapplication of the historian’s facts; and a misapplication that has arisen from an error very prevalent among English theologians, and shared in by Archbishop Whately, in the mode of contemplating the doctrine of a future recompense—as if the expectation of a future were somehow incompatible with the experience of a present recompense. We shall have occasion to expose this error by and bye. But, meanwhile, we assert that such a dissolution of manners and general lawlessness as took place at Athens under the awful visitation of the plague, and as always to some extent attends similar calamities, is rather a proof of men’s expecting a future state of reward and punishment than the reverse—that is, of their doing so in their regular and ordinary state of mind, when they appear to pay some regard to virtue, and to wait on the offices of religion. The recklessness of what may be called their abnormal condition, bespeaks how much their normal one was under the restraining and regulating influences of fear and hope.

We hold it, then, as an established fact, that the expectation of a future state of reward and punishment has been the general characteristic of men in every age, wherever they have been so situated as to find free scope to the spiritual instincts of their nature. The general prevalence alone of religious worship is a proof of it; for religion, whether in the nation or the individual, has never long flourished—it soon languishes and expires, when divorced from the belief of a coming state of happiness or misery. The expectation, no doubt, of such a state, in all heathen forms of belief, has never failed to connect itself with many grievous errors, especially as to the mode of existence in the future world, and the kinds of reward and punishment that have been anticipated. There human reason and conjecture have always proved miserable guides; and the doctrines of the metempsychosis, from one fleshly form to another, the higher doctrine of the absorption into the Divine unity, and the fables of Tartarus and Elysium, were but so many efforts on the part of the human mind to give distinct shape and form to its expectations of the future. These efforts were necessarily abortive. And the facts of the case will bear us no farther in the right direction, than in enabling us to assert the prevalence of a wide-spread, well-nigh universal belief of a future existence, mainly depending for the good or evil to be experienced in it, on the conduct maintained during the present life. But so far, we are thoroughly satisfied, they do bear us.

Before leaving this point, we must be allowed to say, that there is a manifest unfairness in the way in which the sentiments of heathen antiquity, especially of its more profound thinkers, are very commonly represented by Warburton and his followers. This is particularly apparent in the use that is made of the alleged secret doctrine amongst them. It cannot be denied that their writings contain strong statements in favour of a future state; but then, it is affirmed, these were only the writings that contained their exoteric doctrines: their real, or more strictly philosophical and esoteric doctrines, must be sought elsewhere. In this way the whole argumentation in Plato’s Phaedo goes for nothing; because that, it is alleged, belonged to the exoteric class, or his writings for the vulgar. A strange sort of vulgar it must have been, that could be supposed to enter with relish into the line of argumentation pursued in that discourse! We should like also, on that supposition, to see the line described that separates, as to form and style, between the philosophical and the popular, the esoteric and the exoteric, in ancient writings. But the ground for such a distinction at all has been enormously exaggerated, and was very much the invention of the later Platonists. Recent criticism has come to a different mind: thus, Professor Brandis, in the article on Plato in Smith’s Dictionary, treats “the assumption of a secret doctrine as groundless;” and the late Professor Butler holds the division of Plato’s dialogues into exoteric and esoteric to be a mere hypothesis.—(Lect., vol. ii., p. 33.) We cannot but reckon it unfair, also, in regard to Cicero, the next great writer of antiquity, who has treated at large of the question of the soul’s immortality, to set against his deliberate and formal statements on the subject, a few occasional sentences culled from his private letters, and but too commonly written when the calamities of life had enveloped him in gloom and despondency. In the first book of the Tusculan Disputations, c. 15, he enunciates both his own and the general belief, as one growing out of the rational instincts of humanity; and we have no reason to question the sincerity of the statement: Nescio quomodo, inhaeret in mentibus quasi seculorum quoddam augurium futurorum; idque in maximis ingenüs, altissimisque animis, et existit maxime, et apparet facillime. He ridicules, indeed, the popular belief about Hades, as contrary to reason, and says enough to indicate how much of darkness and uncertainty mingled with his anticipations of the future; but the belief itself of a state of being after the present is never disparaged or denied, but rather clung to throughout. It admits, however, of no doubt, that in the age of Cicero the general tone of society at Rome among the more refined and influential classes was deeply tinctured with infidelity. The sceptical spirit of the later philosophy of Greece, which regarded nothing as true, except that everything was involved in uncertainty, had become extensively prevalent among the rulers of the world. And such public disclaimers respecting the future punishments of Hades as are to be found in Caesar’s speech against Catiline, ascribed to him by Sallust, or in Cicero’s oration for Cluentius, and the nox est perpetua, una dormienda, of the loose but refined epicurean Catullus (on which Dr Whately lays stress), are no more to be regarded as fair indications of the general belief of heathendom, than the infidel utterances of the French philosophers of last century are to be taken as just representations of the general belief of Christendom.

2. Let us proceed, however, in the next place, to look at the natural grounds for this belief. And here, at the outset, we are to bear in mind a truth which is often verified in respect to men’s convictions and judgments, as well in secular matters as in those of a moral and spiritual kind, viz., that a belief may be correctly formed, or a fact may be truly stated, and yet the reasons assigned for it in individual cases may be, if not absolutely wrong, at least very in adequate and inconclusive. It was the advice of a learned judge to a man of much natural shrewdness and sagacity, when appointed to a judicial function in the colonies, to give his decisions with firmness, but to withhold the reasons on which they were grounded; for in all probability the decisions would be right, while the reasons would be incapable of standing a close examination. We need, not wonder, therefore, if in the higher field of religious thought and inquiry—if, especially in respect to those anticipations which men are prompted to form respecting a future existence—anticipations originating in the instincts of their rational nature, and nourished by a great variety of thoughts and considerations insensibly working upon their minds, both from within and from without—when they began to reason out the matter in their own minds, they should often have rested their views on partial or erroneous grounds. This is what has actually happened, both in ancient and in modern times.^{[161] [161]} Plato’s Repub., B. L, § 5.

If we look, for example, into the most systematic and far-famed treatise which has come down to us from heathen antiquity on this subject the Phaedo of Plato—we can scarcely help feeling some surprise at the manifest fancifulness of some of the reasons advanced for a future state of existence, and their utter inconclusiveness as a whole. It is the greatest of Grecian sages who is represented as unfolding them—Socrates;—Socrates, too, when on the very eve of his martyrdom; and his thoughts have the advantage of being developed by one of the greatest masters of reasoning, and the very greatest master of dialectical skill, of whom antiquity could boast. But what are the arguments adduced? There are altogether five. The first is the soul’s capacity and desire for knowledge, beyond what it can ever attain to in the present life: for, at present, it is encumbered on every side by the body, and obliged to spend a large portion of its time and resources in providing for bodily wants; so that it can never penetrate, as it desires, into the real nature and essence of things, and can even get very imperfectly acquainted with their phenomenal appearances. Hence the soul being made for the acquisition of knowledge, and having capacities for making indefinite progress in it, there must be a future state of being where, in happier circumstances, the end of its being in this respect shall be realized. The second argument is from the law of contraries—according to which things in nature are ever producing their opposites—rest issuing in labour, and labour again in rest—heat terminating in cold, and cold returning to heat—unity resolving itself into plurality, and plurality into unity;—and so, since life terminates in death, death must in turn come back to life; not, however, through the body which perishes, but in the soul itself that survives it. Then, thirdly, there are the soul’s reminiscences of a previous life, by which are meant the ideas which it possesses other than those it has derived from the five senses—such as of matter and space, cause and effect, truth and duty,—ideas which, it is supposed, must have been brought by the soul from a previous state of existence; and if it has already passed out of one state of existence in coming into this world, the natural supposition is, that in leaving it the soul shall again pass into another. The simple and indivisible nature of the soul is advanced as a fourth argument for immortality;—the soul in its essence is not, like bodily substances, compounded, divisible, and hence corruptible, but is itself, like the ideas it apprehends, immaterial, spiritual, incapable of change or dissolution into other elements. Then, lastly, there is the consideration of the soul’s essential vitality, being the principle of life that animates and supports the body, and which, like the element of heat in material substances, may leave its former habitation, but must still retain its own inherent properties—must be vital still, though the body it has left necessarily falls into inertness, corruption, and death.

Such are the arguments advanced in this celebrated discourse for the soul’s immortality—every one of them, it will be observed, except the first, of a metaphysical nature; though toward the close a kind of moral application is made of them, by urging the cultivation of mental, as opposed to sensual, desires and properties. “On account of these things,” Socrates is made to say, “a man ought to be confident about his soul, who during this life has disregarded all the pleasures and ornaments of the body as foreign to his nature, and who, having thought they do more harm than good, has zealously applied himself to the acquirement of knowledge, and who, having adorned his soul, not with a foreign, but with its own proper ornament, temperance, justice, fortitude, freedom, and truth, thus waits for his passage to Hades, as one who is ready to depart whenever destiny shall summon him.” The meaning is, not that the enjoyment of immortality depends upon the cultivation of such tendencies and virtues, for the reasons are all derived from the soul’s inherent nature, and if good for anything are good for every one who possesses a soul, but that, by being so exercised here, the soul becomes ready for at once entering on its better destiny; while in the case of others, a sort of purgatory has first to be gone through—processes of shame and humiliation to detach it from the grosser elements that have gained the ascendancy over it. But in regard to the arguments themselves, who would now be convinced by them?There is manifestly nothing in that derived from the law of contraries; for in how many things does it not hold?how many evils in nature appear to issue in no countervailing good?Neither is there anything in that derived from the supposed reminiscences of a former life—there being in reality no such reminiscences. And the reason found in the soul’s essential vitality is a simple begging of the question; for, apart from what has appeared of this in its connection with the body, what is known of it?What proof otherwise exists of the soul’s vitality? Of the two remaining arguments, the one placed in the soul’s simple and indivisible nature has often been revived. Not only does it recur in Cicero, among the ancients, and in such modern metaphysical productions as those of Clarke and Cudworth; but the sagacious Bishop Butler also makes use of it in his Analogy, and puts it, perhaps, in its least objectionable form. Dr Thomas Brown even lays the chief stress on it: “The mind,” he contends, “is a substance, distinct from the bodily organ, simple, and in capable of addition or subtraction.” That is his first proposition; and his next is, “Nothing which we are capable of observing in the universe has ceased to exist since the world began.” The two together, he conceives, establish the conclusion, so far as analogy can have influence, that “the mind does not perish in the dissolution of the body.” And he adds: “In judging according to the mere light of nature, it is on the immaterialism of the thinking principle that I consider the belief of its immortality to be most reasonably founded; since the distinct existence of a spiritual substance, if that be admitted, renders it incumbent on the asserter of the soul’s mortality to assign some reason which may have led the only Being who has the power of annihilation, to exert His power in annihilating the mind, which He is said, in that case, to have created only for a few years of life.” As if there were here no alternative between the annihilation of the substance of mind, and the destruction of its existence and identity as a living agent! The matter of the body, it is true, is not annihilated at death; the particles of which it is composed still continue to exist, but not surely as the component elements of an organized structure. In that respect the body is destroyed—as far as our present observation goes, annihilated. And why may it not be so in respect to the mind?Allow that this is an immaterial substance, and as such, essentially different from the body; yet, for aught we can tell, it might be capable of being resolved into some condition as far from a continuation of its present state, as that of the dead body is in respect to its living state. The phenomena of swoons and sleep clearly show that immateriality is no security against the suspension of thought and consciousness; and who shall be able to assure us, on merely natural considerations, that death is not a destruction of them? In truth, no sure footing can be obtained here on metaphysical grounds. It was the error and misfortune of the ancient philosophers so far we certainly agree with Bishop Warburton^[162]—that they suffered themselves to be determined by metaphysical rather than by moral arguments on the subject; for this naturally took off their minds from the considerations that have real weight, and involved them in many absurd and subtle speculations, which could not stand with the soul’s personal existence hereafter. When he excepts Socrates from the number, and accounts for his firm belief in a future state on the ground of his avoiding metaphysical and adhering only to moral studies, he certainly gives us a very different view of the reasonings of Socrates on the subject from that presented in Plato. And we are persuaded, that neither was Socrates so singular in his belief, nor the others so universal in their disbelief, of a future state, as Warburton would have us to believe. But, undoubtedly, there would have been far more of belief among them, if their reasonings had taken less of a meta physical direction, and they had looked more to those moral considerations connected with man’s nature and God’s government, on which the stay of the argument should alone be placed.

[162] Div. Leg., B. III., § 4.

Let us now endeavour to indicate briefly the different steps of the ratiocination, which it is possible for unassisted nature, when rightly directed, to take in the way of establishing the belief of the soul’s existence after death in a state of reward or punishment.

(1.) First of all, there is an argument furnished by the analogies of nature,—an argument partly, indeed, of a simply negative character, and amounting to nothing more than that, notwithstanding the visible phenomena of death, the soul may survive and pass into another state of painful or blessed consciousness. For, however nearly connected the soul is with the body, it still is capable of many things that argue the possibility of its maintaining a separate and independent existence. Bodily organs may be lost—even great part of the body be reduced to an inactive lump by paralysis, while the mind exists in full vigour. In dreaming, and the exercise of abstract thought, there is sometimes found the most lively exercise of mind, when its connection with the body is the slightest, and, as far as we can discern, mind alone is at work. Why may it not, then, live and act when it is altogether released from the body—especially when we see the period of its release is often the moment of its highest perfection and most active energy? Those preceding analogies render it not unreasonable to imagine, that such at least may be the case.

Besides, life here is seen to move in cycles. It proceeds from one stage to another each end proving only the starting-point of a new beginning. Man himself exists in two entirely different conditions—before and after birth; and throughout his whole course of life on earth, he is perpetually undergoing change. Other creatures have still more marked changes and progressions in their career. Thus in many insects there is first the egg, then the worm, then the chrysalis, then the fully developed insect. And there are cases (of Aphides) in which as many as six or eight generations of successive change and development pass away, before a return is made to the original type. Such things appearing in the present operations of nature, afford, indeed, no positive proof that life in man is destined to survive the body, and enter on a sphere entirely different from the present; but they are well fitted to suggest the thought—and they meet the objection, which might not unnaturally arise, when the thought was suggested, from the great diversity necessarily existing between the present and that supposed future life. For they show that it is part of the Divine plan to continue life through very different circumstances and conditions.

It is manifest, however, that such analogies in nature cannot be pressed farther than this—they simply render possible or conceivable the soul’s destination to another life, and answer objections apt to arise against it; but they contain no positive proof of the fact. Indeed, proceeding as they do upon the constitution of man’s physical nature, and what is common to him with the inferior creation, they start the objection on the other side—that if on such grounds immortality might be predicated of man, it might also be predicated of all animals alike. But there is another class of analogies, to which this objection does not apply, which bring out the essential difference between man and the inferior animals; and are not simply negative in their character, but contain something of presumptive evidence in favour of a future state, closely connected with the present. The analogies in question are those presented by the adaptations so largely pervading the Divine administration on earth, by means of which every being and every part of being is wisely fitted to its place and condition. We see this adaptation in the construction of the organs of the human body—the eye, the ear, the taste, the limbs,—all so nicely adjusted to the positions they occupy, both in respect to the human frame itself, and to the purposes they have to serve in connection with the material objects around them. We see it in the masticating and digestive apparatus, with which the various kinds of animals are furnished—one after one fashion, another after another, but each most appropriately suited to the nature and habits of the specific animal, and the kind of aliment required for its support. We see it even in the general condition of the inferior creation, which is so ordered in the great majority of instances, that each living creature gets the measure of good of which it is capable, and with which it is satisfied. And then there are prospective contrivances in connection with all animal natures,—contrivances formed at one stage of their existence, and preparing them for entering upon and enjoying another still before them—such as the eyes that are already fashioned in the foetus, and the second row of teeth that lie for a time buried in the mouth of the child, and spring up only when they are required.

Now, when we turn to man with his large capacities and lofty aspirations,—growing and rising as he proceeds through life, but still capable of indefinite expansion, and conscious of desires that can find no satisfaction here, does it not impress itself on our minds, that there would be something anomalous—at variance with the analogies everywhere appearing around us—if man, so formed and constituted, should terminate his existence on earth? He would, in that case, be the only creature that might seem out of place in the world, and that always the more, the higher he rose in the scale of intelligence and purity: in him alone there would be powers implanted, which seemed to fail of their proper end and object. “A brute arrives at a point of perfection that he can never pass: in a few years he has all the endowments he is capable of; and were he to live ten thousand more, would be the same thing he is at present. Were a human soul thus at a stand in her accomplishments, were her faculties to be full blown, and incapable of further enlargements, I could imagine it might fall away insensibly, and drop at once into a state of annihilation. But can we believe a thinking being, that is in a perpetual progress of improvements, and travelling on from perfection to perfection, after having just looked abroad into the works of its Creator, and made a few discoveries of His infinite goodness, wisdom, and power, must perish at her first setting out, and in the very beginning of her inquiries? Would an infinitely wise Being make such glorious creatures for so mean a purpose? Can He delight in such abortive intelligences, such short-lived reasonable beings? How can we find that wisdom, which shines through all His works in the formation of man, without looking on this world as only a nursery for the next, and believing that the several generations of rational creatures, which rise up and disappear in such quick succession, are only to receive the rudiments of their existence here, and afterwards to be transplanted into a more friendly climate, where they may flourish to all eternity?”^[163]

^[163] Addison, in Spectator, Brit. Essayists, vi., No. 111. The essay is a fine specimen of that delicate sensibility and admirably-balanced judgment, which enabled Addison often to seize on thoughts that had escaped profound thinkers. He introduces the argument merely as a “hint that he had not seen opened and improved by others who had written on the subject,” and as something subsidiary to the reasons derived from the essence and immateriality of the soul, which were then chiefly pressed. Bishop Butler contents himself with those current reasons, and has in consequence left his chapter on a future life the most imperfect and unsatisfactory of his whole book. This argument might be presented as one merely arising out of the general law of adaptation, and is so presented by Dr Chalmers in his Institutes. But it is the analogies connected with that law which give it all its power to awaken any presumption in favour of a future state of being for man, as separate and distinct from the inferior creation; for the presumption arises on the contemplation of the apparent discrepancy between man’s present condition and his present capacities, viewed in the light of analogous arrangements in providence. It properly belongs, therefore, to the argument from analogy, and shows how that argument is capable also of assuming a positive form. It bears, too, quite appositely on the real state of the question,—which is not, as Bishop Butler and most others in his day seemed to think, whether the soul is naturally and essentially immortal; but whether we are warranted to conclude it to be the will and design of God, as indicated in our own natures and His government of the world, that it should have a prolonged existence in a future state, different from, yet closely connected with, the present.

(2.) A second and still stronger ground for the general belief in such a state is furnished by the actings of conscience. For it belongs to this faculty to pronounce authoritatively on what men should and should not do, and to record in the secret chambers of the breast sentences of approval or condemnation, according as the things done are perceived to have been right or wrong. But there is always a felt incompleteness about these judgments of the moral faculty, viewed simply by themselves; and they rather indicate, that the things so judged are fit subjects of reward and punishment, than that they have thereby received what is properly due. In short, the authority of conscience, by its very nature, stands related to a higher authority, whose will it recognises, whose verdict it anticipates. And, as Bishop Butler justly remarks concerning it in his sermons, “if not forcibly stopt, it naturally and always of course goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence which shall hereafter second and affirm its own.”

It is from the powerful sway that conscience has in awakening such anticipations, and its tendency to connect its own awards with those of a righteous lawgiver, that we are to account for the predominantly fearful and gloomy character of men’s native thoughts respecting a future state. There is much in their natural condition to dispose them, when looking forward to another region of existence, to clothe the prospect in the most agreeable and fascinating colours, that they might find in it an effectual counterbalance to the manifold troubles of life, and a support amid the approaching agonies of death. But the reverse is so much the case, that it is the apprehension, rather than the expectation, of a future state, which the belief of immortality most commonly awakens. And the vividness with which the mind of heathen antiquity pictured to itself the punishments of Tartarus, appear strangely contrasted with the dim and ghost-like pleasures of Elysium. A ready explanation of this peculiarity presents itself in uncommon operations of conscience, in which the notes of condemnation, if not more frequent, are at least greatly more distinct and impressive, than those of satisfaction; and hence, as in glancing upwards, its sense of guilt naturally awoke the idea of an offended deity, requiring to be appeased by the blood of sacrifice, so in pointing forward, its sentences of reproof not less naturally cast ominous shadows before them, and threw a sombre and forbidding aspect over the coming eternity. The convictions thus produced in men’s minds respecting a future world by the natural workings of conscience, it is plain, involve the recognition of a moral government of the world, and one that is accompanied with sanctions which are destined to take effect in a state of being after the present. It is, if we may so speak, on the background of such a government with such sanctions, that conscience raises in the bosom its forebodings of a judgment to come.—Nor, indeed, on any other ground could it beget either fear or hope for the future.

(3.) But closely connected with this, and strongly corroborative of the argument it affords for a coming existence after the present, is the evidence that appears of a moral government in the actual course of things—a government accompanied by present sanctions. And this we announce as a third, and, upon the whole, the most tangible and convincing, reason for the anticipation of a future state of retribution. But here it will be necessary to go into some detail, as it is in connection with this part of the argument that divines in this country have most commonly erred, and, by a strange inversion, have sought for proof of a future state of retribution rather in the inequalities of the Divine government, or its apparent want of moral rectitude and present sanctions, than in what it possesses of these. Thus, it is mentioned by Jeremy Taylor, in his sermon on the death of Sir George Dalston, as one of the things “which God has competently taught to all mankind, that the soul of man does not die; that though things may be ill here, yet to the good, who usually feel most of the evils of this life, they should end in honour and advantages. When virtue,” he adds, “made man poor, and free speaking of brave truths made the wise to lose their liberty: when an excellent life hastened an opprobrious death, and the obeying reason and our conscience lost us our lives, or at least all the means and conditions of enjoying them, it was but time to look about for another state of things, where justice should rule, and virtue find her own portion.” The want of justice here, and virtue’s bereavement of her proper reward, is thus represented as the main reason and impelling motive for anticipating a better state of things hereafter. And a long array of similar representations might be produced from the works of English moralists and theologians. But we would rather point to the manifestation of this error—the error of overlooking the connection between a present and a future recompense—as exhibited in a more doctrinal form, and with a more direct injustice to the character of Scripture, by those who have treated of the religious tenets and prospects of the Jews. Not unfrequently do we find the one presented as the antithesis of the other—as if the expectation of a future recompense could only begin to take effect when the other began to give way. This is done in the coarsest manner by Spencer, in his work, De Leg. Hebraeorum (L. I., c. vi.), where it is alleged the ancient Israelites were so gross and sensual, so addicted to the flesh and the world, as to be incapable of being moved by anything but present rewards and punishments;—and which is but another modification of the same view—since idol-worship owed its influence chiefly to the expectations of present good or ill, which its imaginary deities were supposed to have at their command, so the tendency to idolatry among the Israelites required to be met by temporal threatenings and promises. As if God were willing by any sort of means to attach men to His service, and were content to fight idolatry with its own weapons, provided only He could induce His people to render Him a formal and mercenary homage! The view of Warburton, as usual, differs only in a slight degree from Spencer’s. It proceeds on the idea, that down to the later periods of the Jewish commonwealth, everything was administered by what he calls an extraordinary providence of present rewards and punishments, which supplied the place of the yet undiscovered and altogether unknown future world; and that in proportion as the extraordinary providence broke down, the belief of a future state of reward and punishment rose in its stead. Dean Graves, in his work on the Pentateuch, follows much in the same track, although he would not so absolutely exclude the belief of a future world from the remoter generations of God’s people. Among the secondary reasons which he assigns for the employment of merely temporal sanctions. To the law, he mentions “the intellectual and moral character of the Jewish nation, which was totally incapable of that pure and rational faith in the sanctions of a future state, without which these sanctions cannot effectually promote the interests of piety and virtue. Their desires and ideas being confined to the enjoyments of a present world, they would pay little attention to the promises of a future retribution, which they could never be sure of being fulfilled.”—(Works, ii., p. 222.) No doubt, if their desires and ideas were, and must have been, confined to a present world;—but why such a necessity?Would it not have been the most likely way to give their desires and ideas a loftier direction, to lay open to their view something of the good and evil to be inherited in the world to come?And if it had consisted with the Divine plan to impart this, is it to be imagined that the Israelites, who were so immeasurably superior to all the nations of antiquity in the knowledge of Divine truth, should on this point alone have been incapable of entertaining ideas which the very rudest of these were found in some measure to possess? But not to spend farther time in the disproof of a notion so manifestly weak and untenable, we must refer more particularly to what Dean Graves, in common with many British divines, regards as the great reason for the silence observed by Moses in respect to a future state. “I contend,” he says (Works, ii., p. 208), “that the reality of an extraordinary providence (i.e., an administration of present rewards and punishments) being established by unquestioned authority, and by the general nature of the Mosaic code, we can thence satisfactorily account for the omission of a future sanction, and that this is the only way in which it can be accounted for.” That is, the present administration of rewards and punishments is the only way of accounting for the omission of future rewards and punishments! This might have been said with some degree of truth, if it had been meant, that through the present the future might be descried; but not in the sense understood by Dr Graves, as if the one had been to some extent incompatible with the other. The truth and reality of the temporal sanction should rather have been viewed as the necessary foundation and undoubted evidence of a future retribution. On this point Hengstenberg forcibly remarks, “Where this foundation—that, namely, of a moral government on earth, a temporal recompense—is not laid, there the building of a faith in immortality is raised on sand, and must fall before the first blast. He who does not recognise the temporal recompense, must necessarily find in his heart a response to the scoff of Vanini at the revelation, ‛which, indeed, promises retributions for good and bad actions, but only in the life to come, lest the fraud should be discovered.’ There is to be found in Barth on Claudian, p. 1078 sq., a rich collection from heathen authors, in which despair as to a future recompense is raised on the ground of unbelief as to a present one. And does not the history of our own age render it clear and palpable, how closely the two must hang together? The doubt was first directed against the temporal recompense; and it seemed as if the belief of immortality was going to rise, in consequence of this very misapprehension, to a higher significance and greater stability. Supra-naturalistic theologians themselves, such as Knapp and Steudel, derived one of their leading proofs of a future retribution from deficiencies of the present one. But the real consequence was not long in discovering itself. The doctrine of reward, driven from the lower region, could not long maintain its ground in the higher. It became manifest that the hope of immortality had fed itself with its own heart’s blood. ‛If ye enjoy not such a recompense on earth,’ says Richter justly, according to the conceptions of the age, ‛God is by no means truly righteous, and you find yourselves in opposition to your own doctrine.’ Where the sentiment that the world’s history is a world’s judgment, is first of all heartily received in the true, the scriptural sense, there the advance becomes certain and inevitable to faith in the (final) judgment of the world.”—(Pent., ii., p. 573.)

Earlier and more appalling illustrations than those referred to in this extract, might have been produced of the certainty with which disbelief in a present, tends to beget disbelief also in a future recompense. In those great and sweeping calamities, in which all distinctions seem to be lost between the good and the bad, all alike standing in jeopardy of life, or ruthlessly mowed down by the destroyer, it is seldom long till a general relaxation of principle, and even total regardlessness of future consequences, comes to prevail. It seems at such times as if the very foundations of religion and virtue were destroyed, and nothing remained but a selfish and convulsive struggle for the interests of the moment: “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” This is the right reading of the account given by Thucydides of the plague at Athens, formerly adverted to, in which the historian tells us, “Men were restrained neither by fear of the gods, nor by human law; deeming it all one whether they paid religious worship or not, since they saw that all perished alike, and not expecting they should live till judgment should be passed on their offences here.” Similar visitations in later times have always been observed to produce similar effects, excepting where religious principle has been so deeply rooted and so generally diffused, as to triumph over present appearances. During the plague of Milan in 1630, deeds of savage cruelty and wholesale plunder were committed that would never have been thought of in ordinary times. Even in London during the great plague in 1665, while there were not wanting proofs of sincere devotion and living principle, there was also a terrific display of the worst passions of human nature. And of times of pestilence generally, Niebuhr says in one of his letters, “They are always those in which the animal and the devilish in human nature assume prominence.” The lurid light reflected from such apparent temporary suspensions of God’s moral government, abundantly shows what results might be anticipated, if its ordinary sanctions did not exist, and the present recompenses of good and evil were withdrawn. It would no longer be the utterance merely of the fool, but the general sentiment of mankind, that there is no God—none judging in the earth now, and therefore none to judge in eternity hereafter. For, as Hengstenberg remarks again, “what God does not do here, neither will He do hereafter. If He is indeed the living and the righteous God, He cannot merely send forth letters of credit for blessing, nor terrify with simple threatenings of future evil.”^[164]

^[164] How strongly the more thinking portion of heathen antiquity clung to the doctrine of a retributive providence as the abiding ground of hope amid appearances fitted to shake it, may be seen alone from the train of argument pursued by Juvenal in his 13th Book, where, treating of the prosperities of bad men, he finds consolation in the thought, that they suffer from the inflictions of an evil conscience, itself the heaviest of punishments; that hence, things naturally pleasant and agreeable, such as delicious food and wines, fail to give them satisfaction; that their sleep is disturbed; that they are frightened with thunder and disease, seeing in such things the signs of an offended deity; and that they go on to worse stages of iniquity, till they are overwhelmed with punishment; and concludes, that if these things are considered, —Poena guadebis amara Numinis iuvisi tandemque fatebere ketus. Nee surdum, nee Tiresiam quemquam esse Deorum. The ground on which we here rest the natural expectation of a future state of reward and punishment, is precisely that which has been so solidly laid by Bishop Butler in the second and third chapters of his Analogy; and it may well excite our wonder, that especially English divines, who must be well acquainted with the train of thought there pursued, should suppose an extraordinary providence, or an exact distribution of reward and punishment on earth, to militate against either the revelation or the belief of a future state. It is simply the want, the apparent or real want, of exactness in these temporal distributions in the usual course of providence, which mars the completeness of Butler’s argument. Yet, as things actually stand, he does not hesitate to draw from the present aspect and constitution of providence the following conclusions: First, That the Author of nature is not indifferent to virtue and vice; secondly, that if God should reward virtue and punish vice, as such, so that every one may upon the whole have his deserts, this distributive justice would not be a thing different in kind, but only in degree, from what we experience in His present government. It would be that in effect, toward which we now see a tendency. It would be no more than the completion of that moral government, the principles and beginning of which have been shown, beyond all dispute, discernible in the present constitution and course of nature. And from hence it follows, thirdly, that as under the natural government of God, our experience of those kinds and degrees of happiness and misery which we do experience at present, gives just ground to hope for and to fear higher degrees and other kinds of both in a future state, supposing a future state admitted; so, under His moral government, our experience that virtue and vice are actually rewarded and punished at present, in a certain degree, gives just ground to hope and to fear, that they may be rewarded and punished in a higher degree hereafter. And there is ground to think that they actually will be so, from the good and bad tendencies of virtue and vice, which are essential, and founded in the nature of things; whereas the hindrances to their becoming effect are, in numberless cases, not necessary, but artificial only. And it is much more likely that these tendencies, as well as the actual rewards and punishments of virtue and vice, which arise directly out of the nature of things, will remain hereafter, than that the accidental hindrances of them will. The solid foundation which these considerations lay for the expectation of a future state of reward and punishment, and which, growing out of the observation of what is constantly taking place here, must be felt in thousands of bosoms that never thought of turning it into the form of an argument, is entirely overlooked by Archbishop Whately in the essay formerly referred to. He does not, indeed, like Warburton and Graves, place the temporal rewards and punishments in direct antagonism to the disclosure of a future state; but neither does he make any account of the one as constituting a proper ground for the expectation of the other, and forming a kind of natural stepping-stone to it. His line of argument rather implies that it would have the reverse tendency, and that the Jews were only prepared to receive the doctrine of immortality when their present temporal blessings ceased (§ 10). He deems it absolutely incredible that the Israelites, as a people, should have looked for an after state of being, seeing that their attention was so very rarely, if at all, directed to such a state, and seeing also that they so seldom believed what was of much easier credence—the temporal promises and threatenings held out to them. The presumption against it he thinks greatly strengthened by the difficulty still experienced in getting people to realize the prospect of a future world, notwithstanding the comparative clearness and frequency with which it is pressed on their notice in the Gospel. In this, however, two things are evidently confounded together—the speculative knowledge or notional belief, and the practical faith of a future state of happiness and misery. For, on the same ground that Dr Whately denies the hope of immortality to those who lived under the Jewish dispensation, he might hold it to be very doubtfully or darkly propounded to believers now. Besides, he is obliged after all to admit, that somehow the doctrine and belief of a future state did become prevalent among the Jews long before the revelations of the Gospel,—an admission which is totally subversive of his main positions; for, beyond all dispute, this prevalent belief arose without the doctrine being frequently and directly inculcated in any book of authoritative Scripture. It is fatal, also, to the argument from 2 Timothy 1:10, “Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” For, if the knowledge of a future state existed at all before Christ, this could not have been brought to light by Him, as a thing till then wrapt in utter darkness and obscurity. Nor does the statement of the Apostle imply so much. It merely declares, that by means of Christ’s Gospel a clear light has been shed on the concerns of a future life; they have been brought distinctly into view, and set in the foreground of His spiritual kingdom. And we have no more reason to maintain, from such a declaration, that all was absolute darkness before, than to argue from Christ being called “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9), that a total ignorance reigned before His coming in regard to the things of God’s kingdom. In truth, it is no more the specific object of the Christian, than it was of the earlier dispensations, to disclose and formally establish the doctrine of a future state. They both alike take it for granted, and have it for their immediate aim to prepare men for entering on its realities. Only, in the dispensation of the Gospel, as there the adequate provision for eternity is made, and the way laid open into its abiding mansions, a light shines upon its momentous interests, which, from the nature of things, could not be imparted previously, without confounding shadow and substance together, and merging the preparatory in the final. But still the existence of a future state of reward and punishment was implied from the very first in the history of the Divine dispensations, and is not doubtfully indicated in many of the earlier notices of Scripture, as among the settled beliefs of God’s people. It was implied even in the first institution of a religion of mercy and hope for fallen man; since, connecting with God’s worship the prospect of a recovery from the ruin of sin, it would have only mocked the worshippers with false expectations, unless an immortal state of blessedness had been the issue it contemplated for such as faithfully complied with the appointed services. It was implied in the special dealings of God with His more honoured servants,—such as Abel and Enoch before the flood, and after it Abraham and the patriarchs,—whose history, in many of its bearings, is an inexplicable riddle, if viewed apart from the hope of better things to come in their future destiny. It is implied again, as an object of well-grounded faith and expectation, to such persons and their spiritual seed, in the relation which God acknowledged Himself to hold towards them, as their and their Father—titles that manifestly bespoke for them an abiding interest in his eternal power and Godhead.—(Genesis 6:2; Exodus 3:6; Exodus 4:22; Matthew 22:32; Hebrews 11:16) Could such special dealings and revelations have been made to the ancestors of the Jewish race without awakening a response in the bosoms of those that received them? Could they have failed to stimulate and call forth that instinctive belief in a future state, which even common providences were sufficient to evoke in all other nations of the earth?The idea is utterly incredible: and scanty as the notices are which are given us of their feelings and prospects (for a supernatural restraint was laid upon the sacred penmen in this respect), they yet tell us of a hope in death which was enjoyed by the good,—a hope which it was the highest wish of Balaam in his better moods to possess as his own last heritage the hope of being gathered, in the first instance, to their fathers in the peaceful chambers of Sheol, and of ultimately attaining to a better resurrection.—(Genesis 25:8; Genesis 49:33; Numbers 23:10; Hebrews 11:13; Hebrews 11:35)

These views respecting the earlier dispensations, as connected with the doctrine and belief of a future state, are strongly confirmed by the argument maintained in the Epistle to the Romans, and that to the Hebrews. The professed object of these Epistles is to prove the necessity of the Christian religion, and its superiority over even the true, though imperfect, forms of religion that existed before it. And if there had been such an utter lack of any just ground for the expectation of a future state in the Old Testament dispensations, as is supposed by those we are now contending against, the chief stress would naturally have been laid upon the great omission in this respect which had been supplied by the Gospel. But is it so in reality?So far from it, that the reverse is frequently stated, and uniformly assumed. Ancient as well as present believers looked and hoped for a better existence after this. The main discussion in both epistles turns on man’s relation to the law of God, and (to use the words of Coleridge, “Aids to Reflection,” vol. i., p. 293), “to the point, of which this law, in its own name, offered no solution—the mystery which it left behind the veil, or in the cloudy tabernacle of types and figurative sacrifices. It was not whether there was a judgment to come, and souls to suffer the dread sentence; but rather, what are the means of escape?where may grace be found, and redemption? Not, therefore, that there is a life to come, and a future state; but what each individual soul may hope for itself therein; and on what grounds: and that this state has been rendered an object of aspiration and fervent desire, and a source of thanksgiving and exceeding great joy; and by whom, and through whom, and for whom, and by what means, and under what conditions these are the peculiar and distinguishing fundamentals of the Christian faith. These are the revealed lights and obtained privileges of the Christian dispensation. Not alone the knowledge of the boon, but the precious inestimable boon itself, is the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ.” To return, however, to our main theme: We hold it to be a great and unhappy oversight that has been committed by many, who, in ignoring the connection between a present and a future recompense, have thereby left out of view the very strongest of nature’s grounds for anticipating an hereafter of weal or woe. But it is quite possible to err on the one side as well as on the other. “There is no error so crooked, as not to have in it some lines of truth.” And it seems to us, that Hengstenberg, in the treatise already quoted from, has, to some extent, overlooked the lines of truth which are in the error he controverts. It is quite true, as he has correctly and vigorously stated, that the temporal is the necessary basis of the future recompense; and that it is from what God does here men are to argue, and in fact do argue and infer, regarding what He will do hereafter. It is also true, as farther stated by him, that a clear knowledge of the breadth and purity of God’s law, and of the various spiritual ends God aims at in His dealings with men on earth, are sufficient to explain many seeming irregularities in His outward providence; as it discovers enough of imperfection in the righteousness of the good to account for their liability to sufferings, and enough of evil in the prosperity of the bad to render their condition destitute of real blessing. All this is admitted, and yet one cannot but feel that there is something which is left unexplained by it, or not thoroughly met. The assertion of a perfect administration of right holds in the full sense, only when eternity is added to time: that is, when the point now under consideration is virtually taken for granted. Looking simply to a present world, it is impossible to maintain that the administration is perfect; the more impossible, the clearer and more spiritual our views are of the law of righteousness. For how, then, could the doers of righteousness be found to suffer, as is sometimes the case, for their good deeds?or how could prosperity of any kind be accorded to the enemies of righteousness?True, their prosperity may prove in the long run their punishment, but only in respect to its bearing on the issues of a coming eternity; and even then only as abused on their part, not as given on the part of God. In themselves, His gifts are all good; and the commonest bounties of providence, if conferred on the unworthy, mark a relative imperfection, at least, in the administration of justice on earth. Without some measure even of real imperfection, where would there be room for the cry of an oppressed Church, “Lord, how long?” Or where again the necessity for the righteous looking so much away from the present world, and fixing their expectations on what is to come?In truth, a certain degree of imperfection here is as much to be expected, and, in a sense also, as necessary, as in all the preparatory dispensations of God. For it is the feeling of imperfection within definite limits, which more especially prompts the soul to look and long for a more perfect future. To bring the discussion to a close: It is indispensably necessary, in order to ground the conviction and belief of a future state of reward and punishment, that there should be in the present course of the Divine administration palpable and undoubted evidences of a moral government of the world. And in furnishing these in such manifold variety, and with such singular clearness, consisted the peculiar service rendered by the Mosaic dispensation to the doctrine of a future state. But enough being seen in the providence of God to establish this doctrine in the convictions of men, the appearance, along with that, of anomalies and imperfections, must naturally tend to confirm its hold on serious minds, and foster the expectation of its future realities; as they cannot but feel convinced, that a righteousness which gives such indubitable marks of its stringent operation, shall sometime remove every defect, and perfect its work. They deem it certain, that under the government of a God to whom such righteousness belongs, the apparent must at length be adjusted to the real state of things, and that all instances of prosperous villany and injured worth must be brought to an end. “There is much, therefore,” to use the words of Dr Chalmers, “in the state of our present world, when its phenomena are fully read and rightly interpreted, to warrant the expectation, that a time for the final separation of all those grievous unfitnesses and irregularities is yet coming—when the good and the evil shall be separated into two distinct societies, and the same God, who, in virtue of His justice, shall appear to the one in the character of an avenger, shall, in virtue of His love, stand forth to the other as the kind and munificent Father of a duteous offspring, shielded by His paternal care from all that can offend or annoy in mansions of unspotted holiness.”^[165] Were it not, he justly adds, for the element of justice visible in God’s administration, we should have no stepping-stone to arrive at this conclusion. And yet the partial defects and imperfections apparent in its present exercise have their share in contributing to the result; as they materially tend, when once the conclusion itself is established in the mind, to nourish the expectation of another and more perfect state to come.

[165] Institutes, vol. i., p. 131.